Charles F. Bolden Jr. became the first Black NASA Administrator in 2009. He logged more than six hundred hours in space over the course of four shuttle missions. During Bolden's eight-year tenure as NASA Administrator, the agency developed a spacecraft to carry astronauts to asteroids and Mars, landed the Curiosity rover on Mars, and launched spacecraft to Jupiter. Charles F. Bolden Jr. lives outside Washington, DC.

Tonya Bolden has authored, coauthored, or edited more than forty books, including Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow with Henry Louis Gates Jr., No Small Potatoes: Junius G. Groves and His Kingdom in Kansas, illustrated by Don Tate; and Facing Frederick: The Life of Frederick Douglass, a Monumental American Man. She is the recipient of a Coretta Scott King Author Honor, an Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children, and the Virginia Library Association Jefferson Cup Award, and several of her books have been named School Library Journal Best Books of the Year. She lives in New York City.